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Is a new potent designer drug behind vicious Martin County attacks?

UPDATED 3:40 p.m. What is causing young men to viciously and randomly attack couples in their home in Martin County?

Sheriff William Snyder says investigators found a tantalizing clue after a second such attack this weekend in a Stuart neighborhood: a designer drug in the bath salt class that didn’t initially show up in any police database.

Snyder at a Monday news conference identified the substance as dibutylone, a type of hallucigenic bath salt. Users online warn of the powerful drug, calling it “a beast.”

Nico Gallo, 19, went “cannonballing” through a window of a Hibiscus Park residence around 2 a.m. Sunday morning where a mother and son battled him from one end of the house to another until deputies subdued him, the sheriff said.

Gallo exhibited “extreme strength and a high tolerance to pain” early Sunday morning. The mother hit Gallo several times with a baseball bat, but it had no affect on the drugged-out teen.

What is even more concerning to Snyder is that the assault was very similar to one on Aug. 15, in which authorities say Austin Harrouff, also 19, stabbed a couple to death in their Tequesta garage, biting one victim severely.

Bath salts are the street name for a designer drug that is anything but for a soothing soak. It is a sister illicit substance to flakka and in the cathinone family of drugs often sold over the internet as legal products.

A picture of the drug the Martin County Sheriff’s Office believes the teen took before the incident. (MCSO/Facebook)

And just like Harrouff after the Aug. 15 attack, the suspect was hospitalized, unconscious and intubated, usually done to assist breathing. On Monday, Gallo was listed in stable condition.